Hiding Your Sensitive Data From Google and the World
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There have been some recent cases of turmoil caused by the fact that Google indexes data like telephone numbers, credit cards, social security numbers, and other private and sensitive data, thereby making it available to the world. Once upon a time you had to be a hacker in order to get such valuable information, while nowadays Google and the other search engines serve it right on your desktop. But is that the real problem we're facing?
Leakage of sensitive information has always existed, but with the advent of search engines it becomes a bigger problem. Now sensitive information is incredibly easy to retrieve, even by beginners. Many people blame the search engines for this, but in most cases search engines just do their job; they index whatever they find on the servers over the internet.
Sure, it is unpleasant at best to have your private data available to anyone. There are really many dangerous things malicious people can do to you, if they have personal information of yours. It is a little comfort that stealing credit card numbers through Google and the other search engines is not (yet) the primary way of getting them. Direct attacks on the database targets are still the primary way to steal information. When posted on a web server that search engines index, this data becomes easily available to everyone. If not removed, it will stay in the search engines indices forever.
I am afraid that most often it is not Google's fault, because Google's spider will not break into an office and index files on a computer that is not connected to the internet or are properly isolated from the web. Google's task is only to index files on web servers, and the fact that it finds so much sensitive information means only one thing. Those who are responsible for keeping this information away from Google's crawlers have not done their job.
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